


Family Friends

by aliasjacket



Category: Dear Evan Hansen - Pasek & Paul/Levenson
Genre: Canon-Typical Profanity, Friendship, Gen, Post-Canon
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2017-04-16
Updated: 2017-04-16
Packaged: 2018-10-19 16:55:02
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,915
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/10644105
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/aliasjacket/pseuds/aliasjacket
Summary: The last words Jared had said to him had been, quite literally: “Fuck you, Evan! Asshole!” Days later, Evan is not sure how he feels about it. The whole encounter had rattled him, left him numb – Jared, his hands balled up into fists, glasses slightly askew, shouting something about Evan knowing who his friends were. And Evan, taking a step closer, confrontational in a way he never was, before: “Maybe the only reason you talk to me, Jared, is because you don’t have any other friends!”





	

On Thursday, Evan stands in the Murphy family’s kitchen. He presses the inside of his right forearm to his stomach, fingers grappling with the soft fabric of his hoodie. The Murphys are yelling about Connor; Zoe, red-faced, accuses her parents of never being there for him, of being just as bad as each other. Connor’s mother has both hands splayed across the table, her arms tense. She says, with some difficulty, that Connor had been trying, that he had written so in his suicide note. Connor was trying, she repeats, he was trying –

It is at this point that something raw and overwhelming, something like guilt, expands inside Evan’s chest and washes over his head. It is getting harder for him to breathe.

“He didn’t write it!” shouts Evan, louder than he intended. He can feel tears threatening to appear at the corners of his eyes, and he thinks, almost distantly, that he had always been a crier.

*

On Friday, Evan takes the day off from school, choosing instead to sit cross-legged on the bed in his room, his laptop open beside him. He has a large, pink pillow tucked under one arm, and he occasionally kneads at it, pressing it to his side in much the same way he used to clutch at stuffed animals when he was younger. It feels strange, almost sickening, to be on the Internet; this is where The Connor Project started, where he and Alana and Jared put up the website and the Facebook page and the Kickstarter. The task of confessing to them what he told the Murphy family looms over Evan’s head. Briefly, he considers logging into Facebook and the rest, using his administrative privileges to delete whatever he can of The Connor Project off the Internet. Wipe the slate clean.

But that would only draw more attention. Better to wait until the Internet forgets about the success of the Kickstarter, forgets about his speech. Evan ends up avoiding social media entirely. Instead, he reads a number of articles on dendrochronology, the study of assigning time periods to tree rings. Wikipedia describes it as “dating tree rings.” Jared would have tried to make a joke out of that, Evan thinks. _Dating tree rings… like, romantically?_ Jared would say, waggling his eyebrows. _Are you going to have a nice, candlelit dinner with a tree, maybe talk about your hobbies, favorite sex positions?_

Jared is a jerk, even this pretend Jared whom Evan is imagining now. Society could collapse, the world could end, and Jared would still be a jerk: making crass jokes at inappropriate times, with the same stupid smirk plastered over his face. It is steadying to know that despite everything, despite the uncontrollable whirlwind that was The Connor Project, despite the fact that Evan still cannot make change with the pizza delivery worker without shaking, Jared is – reliably, inherently – an asshole.

A Wikipedia link leads Evan from dendrochronology to bristlecone pines, which Evan learns are some of the oldest trees on Earth.

*

On Saturday, Evan’s resolve breaks, and he finds himself scrolling through his social media accounts, looking at celebratory birthday posts and recipe videos. Both Facebook and Skype inform him that Jared Kleinman is online. Evan is reminded of his uncomfortably long backlog of Internet conversation with Jared, over both Facebook and Skype, the discussions about the fake emails they write for Connor. They used to collaborate over on Google Docs, Evan thinks – sometimes late into the night, Jared’s presence denoted by a blinking, differently-colored cursor on the documents page, producing line after line of fake email material.

The last words Jared had said to him had been, quite literally: “Fuck you, Evan! Asshole!” Days later, Evan is not sure how he feels about it. The whole encounter had rattled him, left him numb – Jared, his hands balled up into fists, glasses slightly askew, shouting something about Evan knowing who his friends were. And Evan, taking a step closer, confrontational in a way he never was, before: “Maybe the only reason you talk to me, Jared, is because you don’t have any other friends!”

When a smaller chat window labeled “Jared Kleinman” suddenly opens up on Evan’s Facebook, Evan startles from his position on his bed and knocks the pillow he has been holding to the floor.

*

 **Jared Kleinman:** hey u weren’t in school yesterday

 **Jared Kleinman:** my mom told me that she wouldn’t pay for my car insurance no matter what. is this your fault, evan hansen. is this your doing

 **Jared Kleinman:** how am i supposed to pay for my own car insurance when i have exactly 0 money, the worst amount of money to have

 **Jared Kleinman:** listen i know that i very recently said to your face something along the lines of “go fuck yourself” but

 **Jared Kleinman:** ok i might not have finished that sentence but i tried to and it just didn’t work out so that’s it, that’s the entire sentence. also uh are you okay, did something happen, i know that you sometimes miss school because of like anxiety shit but lbr recently things have been Real Fucked Up™

 **Jared Kleinman:** lol the murphy family could probably sue for emotional damage if they ever found out do you ever think about that??? like sometimes i’ll be bullshitting an english essay at like 3 am and i will think about that. fucking rip

A pause. Evan stares blankly at the screen of his mid-range Dell laptop, chewing at his bottom lip. His eyes are watering. He feels a little bit like he wants to cry. He can picture Jared as he probably is now, sitting in his worn-out swivel chair with his legs folded under him.

Those three bouncing dots, shorthand for “Jared Kleinman is typing,” appear again.

 **Jared Kleinman:** hi i have been messaging you for the past five minutes stop leaving me on read

 **Jared Kleinman:** hi it’s me, jared, we’re in the same grade and our parents know each other, you might remember me from the time we straight up fabricated the entire email account of someone who died  

 **Jared Kleinman:** I CAN SEE YOU’RE READING THESE MESSAGES EVAN

 **Evan Hansen:** jared i told them.

 **Jared Kleinman:** what

 **Evan Hansen:** i told the murphys that connor didn’t write the emails.

 **Jared Kleinman:** WHAT

 **Jared Kleinman:** FUCKING HELL, EVAN

 **Jared Kleinman:** IF THIS IS A JOKE

 **Evan Hansen:** listen, can we talk about this over the phone? watching the 3 dots message thing as you’re typing makes me nervous.

 **Jared Kleinman:** OKAY SURE WE CAN TALK OVER THE PHONE. LET ME JUST GET MY CELL PHONE, SO I CAN USE IT TO CALL YOUR WEIRD OFF BRAND CELL PHONE, AND WE CAN TALK ABOUT THIS

 **Jared Kleinman:** YOU DONE SABOTAGED US, EVAN

*

Evan’s phone rings moments later.

“Holy shit,” Jared says. He exhales loudly; Evan can hear the tinny sounds of his breathing coming through his phone speakers. “Holy fucking shit. You told them?”

They talk for almost an hour. Ten minutes in, Evan fears that his hands are sweaty; ten minutes later, he is absolutely sure they are. He explains, as best he can, about the Murphy family.

“I’ve never seen anyone so upset before,” he says. Quietly, helplessly. It feels good to talk about this. Cathartic. He had not ventured into this level of detail in his previous accounts, not even in his conversations with his mother. It is okay for Evan to be honest, even callously so, around Jared. He is struck by the soft realization that while he apologizes to nearly everyone – constantly, almost by reflex – he has not said the words “I’m sorry” to Jared in months, because Jared can be kind of a terrible person and somehow that gives Evan the leeway to be a little bit terrible, too.

“That’s fucked up,” Jared says, for maybe the fifth time, after Evan has finished explaining.

“You can stop saying that, you know,” Evan says.

“Okay, let me reframe it. Picture this: the Murphys learn that you, the kid they’ve been inviting over to their house for like three months by now, have been straight-up lying to them the whole time…” Jared laughs. “Oh my god, your whole thing with Zoe? That’s just…”

“If you say, um, if you say ‘fucked up’ one more time,” mumbles Evan.

Jared makes some kind of snorting noise that translates into static over the receiver. “Or what? You’ll punch me in the face? Over the _phone?_ ”

“Jared? Can I ask you a question?”

He half-expects Jared to snark at him – “That _was_ a question, Hansen” – but instead, Jared simply says: “Fine.”

“Are we…” Evan hesitates. He steadies his cell phone with his other hand, lowers his voice as if sharing a secret. “I know I messed up and you messed up and I’d understand if you never want to talk to me ever again for the rest of your life until we die but are we – still friends?”

He can hear nothing but the faint sounds of Jared’s breathing. Four, five seconds pass. Then, Jared exhales loudly, makes a noise that might have been a laugh. “We’re friends – family friends,” Jared says, in a soft voice that does not sound at all like Jared’s. “We’ve always been family friends... That’s, like, a whole different thing and you know it.”

Evan blinks, then blinks again. It occurs to him that Jared has probably sent him at least twenty different photos of the American actor Michael Cera since The Connor Project’s inception. Evan could find them, if he scrolled up far enough on Skype. Zoomed-in images, screenshots, so low-quality that Evan suspects Jared has been pixelating them using image editing software. Occasionally they are accompanied by incomprehensible text in Comic Sans. _“hey dude have you heard of this guy evan hansen who lovs trees and doesnt appreciate his Personalized Michael Cera Memes??? its bullshit i tell u”_

Evan wipes at his face with the back of his hand. He is aware that he is crying over Jared’s homemade memes and Comic Sans shitposting. _So stupid_ , Evan thinks, and in that moment he feels a glowing, inexplicable fondness for his stupid, terrible family friend.

“Yeah,” he says, his voice cracking. “Yeah, okay. Thanks… family friend.”

“Uh, sorry for calling you an asshole.” A pause. Something shifts in Jared’s voice, and suddenly he sounds like himself again. “Do not tell Alana that I apologized to you,” he says, “or she will physically demand that I also apologize to her for any number of things and I cannot have that in my life.”

“...okay,” Evan manages, before Jared barrels forward again, always the talker.

“Hey. Keep me updated on the Murphy situation, okay? When the cops come to my front door looking for someone who’s helped write fake emails for a kid who killed himself, I want to be _informed_.”

“Jared,” Evan says, “has anyone ever told you that you’re a terrible person?”

“ _Moi, à moi_ ,” Jared replies easily, in a poor approximation of French. “Has anyone ever told you that you fell from a tree like an acorn? Oh, wait, that was me. That was me, I pointed that out.”

“It wasn't funny the first time you said it.” Evan leans over the side of his bed, manages to snag his pillow from the floor. He puts it under his arm again. It feels soft.

Over the phone, Jared says, “No, it was definitely funny.”

*

On Monday, Evan returns to school.


End file.
